Mottled Sculpin

My first collecting trip! (Not counting the hundreds I did as a kid in Illinois.) Chuck and I drove west of Madison today to see what we could find in the creeks around the area. Unfortunately, most of the decent streams are designated trout streams, where netting is prohibited. We used a game/fishing map of WI of Chuck's to find some smaller creeks off the beaten path to try.

Mottled sculpin were the fish of the day! We caught 5 of them at the first stream, and 2 more at another. We also caught 1 brook stickleback. You can see most of them in the picture below, along with a few bait shop minnows.

My next task will be to get the small tank set up better for these guys since I'm going to keep them for a long time. I'll add more rocks and fake plants to give them plenty of cover. Hopefully Chuck and I will be able to find some more interesting species to put in there in the future (logperch, darters, dace, etc).



Update 4/3/09 - I moved all of the bait shop minnows to the big tank so the sticklebacks and sculpins will have more space. The sculpins are doing great. They aren't territorial (yet?) and even like to sit close together. They've been eating flake food and small pieces of nightcrawlers. The two sticklebacks swim around together part of the time, but fight each other at other times. They nip at each other's fins, something that you'll hear a lot about on forums. One of the sticklebacks ate a piece of nightcrawler as well, but they haven't touched the flake food.